


all the drowned ghosts

by Sanamun



Series: Seaglass [2]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: 70th Hunger Games, Annie Cresta-Centric, Annie Is Not Your Poor Mad Girl, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, District 4, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Forced Prostitution, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Past Sexual Abuse, Trans Annie, Victor Is Two Letters Away From Victim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-04-22 14:01:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4837907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanamun/pseuds/Sanamun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Annie Cresta was an angry sea made flesh, and she belonged to nobody but herself.</i><br/> </p><p>This is the story of the 70th hunger games, and the mad girl from District Four.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: The Reaping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PressXToDavid](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=PressXToDavid).



> The idea of Annie's mother being a former games victor was inspired by aimmyarrowshigh's "Five Places Cinna Came From" series. I mean no disrespect to said author. Actually, I'm slightly intimidated by how talented they are, tbh.

This is how it starts:

A reaping ceremony like any other, rows upon rows of scared teenagers (most of them, though, have too much pride to show it), sunburnt and claustrophobic, waiting to find out which of them will be sent off to die, or perhaps to win.

(The difference is mostly linguistic; victor is two letters away from victim.)

And, as every year, standing a way behind the 18 year old boys, with shells in her hair and dead starfish gathered in the skirts of her dress:

“Ayden Cresta!”

_Annie_ Cresta doesn’t react, tracing patterns in the sand with the toe of her boot.

She can hear the shocked whispers in the crowd, _a victor’s kid? is that allowed?_ and _they should call it again, Cresta just ain’t right, everyone knows that_ , and _oh, Annie. That poor, mad girl._

Annie ignores them; she’s used to it. She watches her illusory jellyfish swim through the clouds, free of the games and the reapings in a way that even a comparatively privileged district kid like her isn’t.

Florian Kelly tugs at her sleeve to get Annie’s attention; not always the easiest task in the world.

“Ann. Ann, you’ve gotta get up there. No-one’s gonna volunteer for you.”

(Its funny, when you stop to think of it. Not one person in Four had a bad thing to say about the strange girl who had been a boy, who makes jewellry from seaglass and shells, who talks to the gulls and starfish, but rarely to the people she shares her district with; yet none of them would have been willing to die for her. She can’t help but be grateful for that; Annie will come out of this year’s games with blood on her hands one way or the other, but at least facing the arena allows her the dignity of choice.)

(That isn’t what she was waiting for, though, at any rate.)

“They said Ayden Cresta. That’s what they said. I heard. You must have heard it too, not like those other voices that speak to me that you can’t know. My name isn’t Ayden. It’s Annie. Annie Cresta. They haven’t reaped _me_ , they just think they did.”

“You still have to go up on stage, Ann.” He doesn’t sound happy about it.

She tilts her head to the side and smiles at him, though Florian isn’t entirely sure what’s funny about this situation, before she disappears into the sea of bodies, faded stars scattering the ground as she goes; a saltwater-scented galaxy falling back to Earth.

(And that, sometimes, is how Florian thinks of Annie Cresta, that she is an ocean and a solar system, lonely and lovely and something too remote for him to touch, because Florian Kelly is the poor fisherman’s son who is in love with the mad victor’s daughter and has been since their first reaping. In less than a month, he will see her almost drown on television. He will wonder why he didn’t volunteer in her place. But this is not a story about Florian Kelly.)

Here is a fact: Annie Cresta does not want to be a victor.

(And the Capitol, for their part, do not want her to be; not the mad girl, talking nonsense to herself with her willowy figure half drowning in torn, dirty lace. Not some unstable, gender-confused little freak. She is not their victor. The contempt is mutual.)

The last person from Four to win the games, the only one whose victory Annie is old enough to remember, had been Finnick Odair, a boy too young for the way they presented him; old enough to make people want him but not to understand why.

She sees him around victor’s village sometimes still, and he is beautiful and lost, with ghosts in his eyes and a smile that looks painted on for how out of place it is on his too-perfect face, and privately Annie wonders if there's anything left of the fourteen year old boy with the nervous smiles and the messy hair and the trident, because no human being should be this empty.

(Those sea-green eyes hold more horrors than just the games, she’s sure of it, from watching the way even the other victors treat him like he’ll break if they get too close, and Annie, once, had almost asked. But there are some things you just can’t do, not to people like him, not in Four. Besides, she doesn’t really want to know, what happened to Finnick Odair.)

Annie does not want to win the Hunger Games because she does not want to be like Finnick, used and ruined by the Capitol. She also does not have a choice.

But nobody in District Four says that; you play your part and you look good doing it, and you never, ever forget to smile; you keep the Capitol happy and they keep you comparatively prosperous. Everyone in the district understands that.

It’s something Annie Cresta has been told since she was five years old, and so she walks to the stage, smirking slightly with a confidence she doesn't particularly feel (what she feels is pre-emptive grief for the other tributes; it’s the same for everyone who's stood in her place, she’s sure, but none are allowed to say).

(There are too many secrets in Four, and Annie knows most of them. The sea breeze whispers them to her.)

Silently, she promises her district another year of glory. Secretly, she wonders at what cost.

(And she _will_ survive the arena; there’s no real question of that. Annie is a career tribute, and a career trained by her victor mother, at that. She’ll be older than most of the other tributes at 18; she’s strong and smart and pretty and good with knives. She is not who the Capitol wants, but she is who they will more than likely get. The odds will be ever in Annie Cresta’s favour, as much as that statement holds true for anyone in Panem.)

There’s a trembling fifteen year old waiting for her; Luka something, her memory supplies. She shoots them a reassuring smile and doesn’t get one in return, but Annie tries not to hold that against her fellow tribute. Beside the stage, Lorelai Cresta is openly in tears; she had thought she was beyond losing people to the games after all this time. Finnick Odair tries to comfort her; sends Annie an apologetic half-smile as he does so.

They’re all terrified, in the end.

Annie doesn’t have time to try and make friendly conversation with her soon-to-be district partner, anyway, even if Luka had been more willing to, not before Caldesia Feferi is telling her district to “have a happy Hunger Games!”. She has bright blue hair that reaches past her waist and unnaturally wide eyes, and she sounds almost bored; detached in a way only Capitol citizens can allow themselves to be. Annie wonders how long she’s been an escort, and if she likes her job, but quickly tries to push the thoughts from her mind; she’s a tribute now, and cannot afford to worry about such things.

This is what they will forget, later: There was never any such person as Ayden Cresta, and the games were not what broke her. 

And the way the Capitol chooses to immortalize Annie is not what her district will remember.


	2. saltwater kisses and imaginary monsters

Lorelai Cresta makes Annie promise to come back in one piece.

Coral Brigham all but threatens her into saying she’ll do the same for Luka, because Coral is a good older sister and that’s what good sisters do, Annie supposes.

The trouble is, there is no way for her to do both; eventually Annie will have to decide which of them leaves the arena alive.

(And Four has enough ghosts already; drowned fishermen and sad-eyed ‘victors’ that Annie thinks must be anything but and sixty nine years of dead kids. All the lost souls come back to the sea in the end, Annie has been told. She wonders if that’s why she’s drawn to it.)

(Annie knows all about the ghosts of Four; she doesn’t think they’ll ever forgive her for choosing who joins them in this year’s games.)

The train ride to the Capitol is _awkward_ , is the only way Annie can think to describe it. Mags spends most of it trying to console a crying Luka ( _“I don’t want to die.”_ , Annie can just about make out. _What, and you think I do?_ , she thinks, but she can’t _say_ that because she’s a career with training, even if she didn’t volunteer, and Luka is just a dumb kid who should never have been reaped. It’s not the same. It’s not the same at all.)

Finnick isn’t a mentor that year (Annie isn’t sure if he’s ever been a mentor; he’s barely older than she is) but he apparently has ‘business’ in the Capitol, whatever that means. ( _Maybe he whores himself out so that Four stays a popular district, they love him enough, and it explains everyone he’s with on tv. Among other things._ Annie thinks this and immediately regrets it.) He replies politely but noncommittally to her questions about tactics and sponsors (she wants to ask about his own games, about what the capitol did to him, but she doesn’t think it would be a good idea to alienate one of her district’s victors so soon).

All of the girls Annie has known, and most of the boys, and a fair few grown adults; they all think Finnick Odair is so perfect but privately Annie doesn’t understand the appeal. He’s pretty, and she supposes he’s charming when he wants to be, but it feels like talking to a shadow. There’s nothing real about the boy sitting beside her. It makes her nervous. There are secrets here that Annie doesn’t yet understand.

(For a brief moment, she wants nothing more than to grab Finnick and shake him and hurt him and make him bleed, just to see some flicker of emotion on his perfectly expressionless Capitol-darling face.)

Caldesia Feferi hovers around awkwardly, twirling a strand of her (ridiculous) waist-length blue hair around her fingers. Annie wishes she wouldn’t.

(Already, Annie cannot stand Caldesia Feferi. She’s fake in the same ways as Finnick. Everything from the Capitol is.)

“So.” Annie begins, sensing a conversation that needs to happen and probably won’t if she doesn’t start it herself, “What’d you say our odds are? For the games, I mean.”

(She shouldn’t have bothered to clarify. There’s only one thing the passengers of this train ever get to think about.)

“You should have a good chance,” begins Orca Kevern, Annie’s soon-to-be mentor, a woman with more scars and tattoos then she does unmarked skin, “Luka’s pretty much fucked.”

“How come? There have been 15 year old victors before. I mean, Finnick did it at 14!”

“Because that kid ain’t a Finn Odair. Too damn nice. The sweet little things never make it out the arena alive. It’s the worst of us who win. No offense to present company intended, of course.”

_It’s the worst of us who win._ Such comforting words, coming from the woman who claimed to see Annie as a potential victor.

“You’ll get sponsors if you’re smart about it,” Finnick still sounds like he’s a thousand miles away, but it’s the first thing he’s said that wasn’t in response to a direct question for the whole journey, and Annie knows how to be grateful for the small things. “You’re really quite pretty, Anna. They like that.”

Just because he won by making the capitol want to fuck him, he assumes that’s Annie’s plan as well. Typical.

“It’s Annie,” she corrects, pointedly, “But thanks. I guess.”

“It’s not a good thing.”

Finnick returns to staring out of the window. He’s so intent on doing that, Annie almost finds herself wondering if he’s the same as she is, watching things play where others only saw empty air; watching them watch him back.

(Maybe he’s not in another world so much as another place and another time, but Annie doesn’t understand that. Yet.)

Sea eyes and shadows; saltwater kisses and imaginary monsters. The face in her reflection wasn’t her own, once, too sharp and too thin with too many teeth, and Annie couldn’t stand the way not-her was watching, waiting, _judging_ , so she covered the mirror with a blanket and arranged the shells in the kitchen window into a protection charm; ocean magic, seaglass and salt and starfish, _ghosts of Four take me home, chase away the darkness and make everything real once more._

Lorelai Cresta had sat on the kitchen floor and cried, when she came home from the market and saw what her daughter had done, and Annie hadn’t understood why. _I was just keeping us safe, Ma._ Lorelai took her child’s face in shaking hands and told Annie she was sorry, she’d never wanted Annie to grow up to be the same as she was. She’d wanted there to be at least one Cresta left who wasn’t broken.

(Annie Cresta is not broken, is not a “poor, mad girl”; but nobody ever believes her when she tells them that.)

Lorelai Cresta, Florian Kelly, Coral Brigham. They’re waiting for her and Luka. Seas bring them back safe. Annie doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to be a victor, but she doesn’t want to die, and she decides there and then, watching Luka shake and Orca glare daggers at Caldesia for eavesdropping and the ghosts dance in Finnick Odair’s sea-green eyes, that she will see District Four again.

Now, though, Annie is further from her district that she’s ever been, as the train pulls into the Capitol, and she is a little scared in spite of herself.

For the tribute parade (Annie wonders how many families back in Four could be fed for the price of one of those chariots, and doesn’t come up with an answer she likes), her stylist decides to take away her seaglass rings and the shells around her wrists and ankles, cuts her long hair so it falls in waves to just past her chin. (The scissors nearly cut her neck, and she winces, but not from that.)

He doesn’t understand at all, and Annie is in no position to try and explain with the games so close, so she says nothing when he leans in too close and she can feel his hot breath in her ear as he whispers that she’s “Being such a good boy. The Capitol will love you.”

(Annie Cresta does not want the Capitol to love a version of her that doesn’t exist.)

“Just don’t tell them that your name is Annie, not Ayden, and you can speak to the sea.”

(She thinks but does not say, _but that’s all I am._ )

She ends up dressed in a pair of gold shorts small enough that Annie isn’t sure that they really meet the definition of the word, and an open shirt to reveal the flat chest underneath. (Annie crosses her arms to hide the breasts she does not have.) They want her to be Finnick Odair. They’ve done it every year since his own games. Annie Cresta is not Finnick Odair.

Luka gets a flowing seafoam-green dress, along with ridiculous platform heels strapped to their feet to make them look taller, older; like a tribute and not a scared kid. ( _What’s the difference?_ ) They look about as uncomfortable as Annie feels.

The capitol doesn’t cheer for Annie, but they cheer for the person they want her to be. Maybe, in their minds, that’s the same thing. (They don’t cheer for Luka at all; they’re mourned instead.)

“I thought you were a girl,” Luka says to her that night; not a question, but leaving one hanging in the air between them regardless.

“I thought you were.” Annie counters, instead; watching the way Luka blushes before shaking their head no.

(“Maybe we could swap.” Annie tells him -him, she knows now- “I’ll be the girl tribute, and you can be the boy. Annie Cresta and Luka Brigham, survivors of the Hunger Games, heroes of District Four!”

“You really are mad, then, if you believe that we’ll win.”)

Her interview is more of the same. She says what she’s supposed to, suppresses the part of her that wants to correct every “Ayden” _but maybe it’s okay that they don’t know I’m Annie because true names have power and do I want to let the Capitol hold that sort of sway over me?_   She is a career tribute. She is being Good. She knows all her lines by heart.

When Caesar Flickerman asks her favorite thing about the Capitol, she says she likes the swimming pools. She misses water.

When he asks how it feels to work with _the_  Finnick Odair, she brushes him off with a comment about how she grew up with victors (she wishes she hadn’t said that soon after, when the conversation turns to Lorelai). She doesn’t get overwhelmed by celebrity easily, she tells him, but it’s an honour to know that her district’s victors believe that she can win the games, and she hopes that she can make them proud. She smiles for her audience. The Capitol likes it when they smile.

There’s a small, golden fish darting between Caesar’s empty eye sockets. It’s very distracting.

And things go well, for a while. Annie’s got years of Lorelai’s training behind her ( _“Focus, Annie! In the arena, you can’t yourself get distracted! You’ll be dead if you do that, don’t you understand? You can’t just rely on the other careers to have your back. Please, Annie, I don’t want to lose anyone else, **please** -” “Shh, it’s okay, Mama. I’m not in the games yet, and yours were over years ago. Please don’t cry.”_), she’s smart and strong and fast, though she downplays her abilities where the other tributes can see. She doesn’t want them to see her as the one to beat, not this early. She needs the other careers on their side if she’s going to keep Luka safe. She scores a 10, once she’s not holding herself back. Orca and Mags look proud; Finnick looks conflicted and oddly sad, for reasons she can’t quite place.

Luka turns out to be better with a sword than anyone expected him to be (still not good enough to be a career, though) and comes out with an 8.

The boy from Two (muscular, cocky, not too quick on the uptake- a good tribute, but not a victor) corners her once, and, with a smirk she wants to smack off his face, gestures to Finnick and asks if she’s fucked him yet.

(“What are you looking so fucking shocked over? Odair’s a whore, everyone knows that. It’s how he won the games.” _He was fourteen_ , Annie thinks, and wonders how deep the Capitol’s lies must go, “What, so you never even considered it? C’mon, Cresta, you could be dead within the week, and you’re not even a little curious?”)

Annie ends up punching him in the jaw (too close to her, pretending to make friendly conversation while he searches for her weakness, because sometimes the ocean isn’t her friend and it waits to drag her down into the dark and the cold and the water). Orca asks, in a calm voice that nonetheless betrays her barely-hidden anger, why exactly Annie had wanted to alienate herself from the tribute people were betting on to win before they even entered the arena.

(Annie remembers seeing him with maggots crawling over his flesh and blood dripping from the holes where his eyes should be, and knows that Ajax Titinius is not a victor.)

“Because when I win, I don’t want my lasting reputation to be that I sucked Finnick Odair’s cock.”

“ _When_ you win?” Orca narrows her eyes (sea green like all of Four, but darker and greyer then Annie’s own. Orca Kevern was not only an ocean; she was a tidal wave), “You’ve already decided, then? That you’re going to survive this?”

Annie nods, curtly. “I have to go back to Four, for Mama. For Lorelai. She doesn’t do so well on her own. And she’s been making so much progress of late, it would be awful if that was all undone by my dying in the arena. Besides, we’re a career district that hasn’t had a victor for half a decade; isn’t it about time that changed?”

She hates herself only a little when she adds, “We both know that I can do it, and Luka can’t. As you said, it’s the worst of us who win.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple lines in this chapter, most obviously the don't tell them your name is Annie and you can speak to the sea/but that's all I am couplet, are somewhat shamelessly borrowed from my earlier fic "driftwood bones and seafoam hearts", which was sort of a place for me to play with some of the ideas that would eventually become this story.


	3. an angry sea made flesh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tags have been slightly edited. This is longer than the past two chapters, because plot! Plot is now a thing.

The night - or rather, morning- before the games, Finnick comes to Annie's room. He's wearing an oversized shirt - not his own - and nothing else. His decadent-capitol-prettyboy eyeliner is so smudged that it reminds Annie of a particularly stylish panda.

Every part of his body radiates exhaustion, enough so that you'd think he was the one about to be sent into a fight to the death.

He looks like something you might find washed up, barely alive, on one of Four's beaches.

"You look like shit," she tells him, blunt as ever. 

Finnick's shirt falls open when he turns to look at her, revealing the start of a rather unpleasant bruise on his hip. It's almost a perfect handprint, and she pretends not to notice.

"You're probably the only person in Panem who would say that to Finnick Odair when he's half naked."

It’s a joke. She's meant to laugh at jokes. And she does, only half a moment too late. 

(Smile for the camera. Annie Cresta is acting like a victor already.)

“Think about why you want this, Annie.” Finnick begins with a sigh. He can’t quite make himself look at her eyes and settles for the wall behind them instead. “Being a victor is- it’s not-.”

“Are you seriously trying to tell  _ Lorelai Cresta’s daughter  _ that being a victor isn’t what they show us on TV? I’ve overheard enough of Mama’s nightmares to already know that, thanks. That doesn’t mean I can just not try to win the games. Mama needs me. People back in the district need me.  _ I don’t want to die;  _ I think surviving is always better than the alternative-”

It’s only then that Annie manages to pull herself out of her self-righteous anger enough to pay attention to Finnick, and realizes that he’s shaking, because he walked into the room on the verge of a panic attack and she proceeded to yell at him.

_ Speaking without thinking, as usual, Annie. Someday that will get you in trouble. _

“Um. Sorry. That came out harsher than I meant it to. Sometimes I forget to watch my words and they get away from me like sea snakes, always wriggling to get free, you know how it is. I’m probably in the wrong place for that. Are you okay? Finnick?”

She hesitates, thinks things through. (Consider it practice, Annie. Your biggest advantage in the arena is how fast you can analyze a situation.) Remembers Finnick’s shaking hands and too-haunted green eyes and the desperation in his voice. He was going to warn her about something.

And maybe she knows what.

“Finn? What did they do to you?”

(That question sealed Annie Cresta’s fate, although she does not know it.)

“They own you, once you win.” he begins, sounding like he’s trying to work out how much he’s allowed to say. “They decide what role they want you to play. I’ve sort of been passed around since my games. To rich capitol assholes Snow wants to keep happy. You can have a victor for the night if you can afford it, because of course you can, they can have whatever they want-”

“Finn-” she starts to say something, but he cuts her off before she can finish.

“They threaten your loved ones if you don’t play nice, Annie. So you do it. What other choice do we have? The girl from last year, Johanna Mason, she said no and- well. That’s her story to tell, not mine. But just- think about whether or not you want to win. If it’s worth it.”

And she has nothing to say to that, but she thinks  _ if it isn’t me, it’ll be one of the other tributes.  _

(What other choice do we have, indeed.)

-

_ 50… 49… 48…  _

Annie’s district token is a necklace of shells Lorelai Cresta had made for her as a child, back when Lorelai was usually lucid enough to do such things.

_ 39… 38… 37... _

Annie glances around the arena, calculating. 

_ 28… 27… 26… _

This is everything she’s trained for since before she was reaping age, yet she feels horribly unprepared.

_ 17… 16… 15… _

She finds Luka, makes eye contact. Gives him a reassuring smile.

_ 10… 9… 8… _

“Get away from the cornucopia”, she mouths in Luka’s general direction, “I’ll come back for you.”

_ 6… 5… 4… _

A flash of Finnick the night before, all too-wide green eyes and secretive fear. Think about why you want this.

_ 3… 2… 1… _

No time for that now. Focus, Annie. 

_ Let the 70th annual hunger games begin. _

_ - _

At the bloodbath, Annie slits the throats of two children, and snaps another’s neck. They wouldn’t have made it long in the games anyway, she tries to justify to herself. They were too poor, too young, too underprepared. Not strong or smart or pretty enough. Not enough like Cashmere and Enobaria and Finnick Fucking Odair.

_ (They own you, once you win.) _

She doesn’t want to admit that Finnick got into her head, but he has. She looks at the too-small body of the boy from 10 and thinks,  _ maybe it’s a good thing they won’t be victors.  _

Annie and Luka join the other career tributes, though Annie is secretly sure that they’re considered cannon fodder more than they are allies. They sleep in shifts that first night, swapping stories about their lives from Before.

(Before what? Before everything. And nothing. Before everything became nothing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

The girl from One is called Adora. She was top of her class in career school, she says, and she refused to let her stylist remove the scar beneath her left eye, marring her otherwise perfect face, because she wanted the father that put it there to see it when he watches the games. She says all of this with a glamorous, affected sort of boredom; Annie is almost sure she’s practised the speech in the mirror, knowing that it would make her popular with the Capitol.

(More than anything else, more than violence or spectacle, they want a story. Something to add colour to their painfully monotonous lives.)

Her district partner is a boy called Velvet. He hangs on her every word.

Ajax, who still bears the bruise Annie gave him during their first days in the capitol, and Topaz, who is small and dark and calculating and possibly more dangerous than any of Annie’s other competition, weren't meant to be Two’s tributes this year, she learns. They volunteered anyway, on the agreement that they’d go into the games together. They will either live or die as the fates decide, Topaz explains, but they won’t make each other do it alone.

_ It’s all very tragic and star-crossed, really.  _ Annie thinks, swiftly followed by  _ they’re doomed. _

_ - _

The 70th Hunger Games is a popular one with the Capitol, with one of the most organised career packs of recent years, picking off the other tributes one by one, guided by the fragile alliance between Annie and Adora.

Less than a week into the games, and they’re the only ones left alive. 

And that’s when, inevitably, it all goes wrong.

Annie wakes one night to Adora standing over her with a sword.

(Back in the Capitol, Orca Kevern swears loudly, takes off her headset, and wonders how she’ll ever explain this to Lorelai, as she looks away from her so-called victor-to-be.)

Before Annie can fully register what’s happening through the haze of sleep, before she can blink the ghosts from the edge of her vision, an ocean spirit, with the fins of a shark and the horns of something that the people in the before-times used to call a devil, is pulling Adora away from her.

Not a ghost, Annie, not a monster. Luka. Reckless, naive, _ fifteen year old  _ Luka. Come on, Cresta, you might be mad but surely even you know that?

And then everything becomes hazy: Velvet runs at Luka with his axe, the boy’s head falls to the ground with an unsatisfying  _ thud _ . That wasn’t meant to happen.

Annie panics.

She has good instincts, grabs Adora’s pretty face and presses her thumbs into those big blue eyes (empty like a mirror). She was born to be a victor, she knows, and this is why. They put these fancy bath pearls in her room in the Capitol, as though saltwater wasn’t enough, and when Annie squeezed them in her hand they popped, spilling their contents over the expensive sheets. That’s what killing Adora feels like; pressing down on two bath pearls and feeling them  _ squish  _ under the pressure of her trembling hands. 

Annie takes the other girl’s blade and cuts neatly through her stomach and into her heart (it’s the fastest, kindest way to do it, or so they say). Adora falls the the ground and Annie scrambles to her feet. She grabs Luka’s lost head as she goes (find water, let him be buried in the waves and all is undone. That’s Four’s way. That’s what will make things right. _But it won’t bring him back, will it, Annie Cresta? It won’t change that Coral Brigham’s kid brother is dead because you couldn’t save him_ ). 

Then she runs.

She doesn’t look back, but if she had she would have seen Velvet, Topaz and Ajax staring after her with something like fear in their eyes. None of them try to stop her. Why would they, after what they’ve just seen? She’s crazy, that Annie Cresta. District Four’s mad, mad tribute.

-

Annie sits in a cave with Luka’s head in her lap, not far from a dam. It’s the only water source in the arena; the other tributes will have to come eventually. Annie doesn’t care.

Her kill count so far is five. One more won’t be much of a mark on her soul. Annie Cresta is already a murderer, because that is what they want her to be. And if she survives this they will have another use for her, too, in smoky private rooms and at extravagant capitol parties, and Finnick said they own you once you win but Finnick was wrong. Annie understands that now. They’ve always owned her. Their perfect career, their perfect tribute. She has never been more than what they made her.

Annie-who-was-once-Ayden Cresta tugs at the ends of her too-short dark hair from where the capitol decided who she was going to be.

Not again. Never again.

Annie Cresta is an angry sea made flesh and she belongs to nobody but herself.


	4. the dark things below

Annie hides out in the cave for nearly two days. She is tired and she is hungry and everything hurts, but she refuses to leave, to go back to the careers _perfect little dolls fighting for the chance to be used and thrown away by the Capitol, I’m not like that I won’t I can’t,_ to be a Victor.

Luka waits there beside her, and he passes his skull from one hand to the other.

_“They always did warn us not to lose our heads in the arena, right, Cresta? Guess I should have listened-”_

Annie covers her ears with her hands to block out the sounds, _it’s not real it’s not real it’s not real._

_“-or maybe I’m being too literal. Maybe it was you it was meant for. Poor, mad little Ayden Cresta. They’ve always said that about you, you know? Don’t go near that one, he ain’t quite right. Calls himself “Annie” and everything; talks to dead air. Talks to a fucking severed head.”_

Annie throws one of her knives at the illusion, is momentarily surprised when all it hits is the cave wall.

_“But then again, you know you’ll survive this. You’ll be a victor, and you’ll be just like Finnick Odair and Johanna Mason and your own dear, sweet Mama.”_

That’s when the earthquake hits and the cave starts to collapse on top of her.

-

She loses her weapons and her supplies and _Luka, the only bit of Luka she has left,_ to the falling rocks, but she manages to find her way to what’s left of the dam.

Annie Cresta has studied past games, Lorelai had encouraged anything that gave her a better chance, and she knows that there are flaws in the arenas. She’s read about Haymitch Abernathy and the forcefield, Beetee Latier and his wires. You can win by being smarter than the Capitol thought to prepare for.

Annie doesn’t want to win ( _sorry, Mama. But I won’t live like you did._ ) but she does want to make the Capitol feel stupid.

Because they took her and Luka and Finnick and oceans only know how many other kids and made them into murderers and whores and ghosts.

Because she can’t seem to wash Adora’s blood off her hands and it isn’t right it isn’t _fair_ she never wanted this.

They all say that Annie Cresta is mad. They’re right; she’s _mad as hell_ and it’s time she got to be the monster.

The earthquake weakened the dam. It doesn’t take much force from Annie and the small rock that replaced her knives before she feels something in it give way and water gushes out, flooding the arena, purifying Annie in it’s wake and taking Adora and Luka’s souls for it’s own.

_Everything (everyone) has a breaking point eventually._

Annie lets herself be taken by the currents until she is a part of the flood herself, dancing through the water like she’s always belonged there. She was the best swimmer in the district, and she had come home one day when she was fourteen to tell Lorelai of that fact, half-drunk on adolescent excitement, only for her Mama to shrug and tell her, _So what? You can’t win the hunger games by swimming._

Her Mama is wrong about a lot of things.

She finds Ajax first, and she can tell he has been crying from the red of his eyes even long after the flood washed away the other evidence. Him and Topaz separated from Velvet, he says, because they didn’t trust him. He’d gone to look for food. He doesn’t know where Topaz is. She’s a better swimmer than he is. He’s scared.

Annie treads water beside him for a while, and she holds him up and promises that the games will be over soon.

“Wasn’t much of a career, was I? Oh well. I did the best I could.” and Ajax Titinius smiles softly at Annie Cresta as he lets her go.

-

She isn’t Annie anymore, she’s water, and she will drag the other tributes down down down into the depths of her ocean.

Velvet killed Luka, but now Luka’s shade swims alongside her, able to keep her pace in a way he never would have been in life, his words a taunting singsong in her head.

_Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, see if you can swim away from the mess you’ve made this time, crazy girl._

And when they find Velvet, he is the one that encourages Annie to hold her fellow tribute beneath the surface until he breathes no more, and then laughs at her when she does.

 _You’ll drown them all, right? Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. But what then? Once you’ve taken your friends to a watery grave, what will be left of_ **_you_** _, Annie Cresta?_

Velvet is stronger than her on land but not in water, and it is nothing, _nothing_ for her to hold him down until he is choking on dirty water, _breathing in poison and starfish and he deserves it but you can stop now, Annie, you don’t need to go this far-_

Velvet fights against her grip until he doesn’t anymore.

-

She needs to find Topaz.

The other girl is the only other tribute left, she’s sure of it, and Annie can’t let her win, can’t let her go back to the Capitol and be made into their toy, can’t let everything she’s done be for nothing, and Annie Cresta is a sea monster, a flash flood, the terror of the waves, the panic that grips you as your lungs fill with ice cold water.

She is the avenging messenger of all the drowned ghosts, all the lost children of Panem.

She will drown the capitol in her rage and grief, and she will drag them down into the cold and the water and leave them for the Dark Things below.

She has no other choice left.

-

She’s so tired.

She’s a strong swimmer, but there’s only so much her body can take and eventually, even the water itself decides that Mad Annie Cresta is no longer it’s friend.

And she doesn’t understand what’s happening when the flood suddenly _isn’t,_ just that there are strong arms around her and she needs to fight, needs to make sure the other tributes don’t leave this place, needs to make the Capitol pay for what they stole, but everything hurts so much and it would be so, so easy to just let the waves take her.

It isn’t yet time for the sea to call Annie Cresta home, but she feels the needle’s prick in the back of her neck and the world falls to darkness.

-

When she wakes up, through the haze of exhaustion and morphling and pain, she is no longer water. She isn’t even Annie.  
  
She’s a victor, and the knowledge of that feels like drowning all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...should I apologize for the title drop? I feel like I should apologize for the title drop.
> 
> And also to the non-Annie career tributes, who really don't have the nicest time in this fanfiction.
> 
> This chapter feels too short but I'm not sure what else to do with it. I will also probably never update this frequently again tbh.


	5. ghosts calling her name

“He’s not ready to leave yet, but Snow insists.”

The nurse is a plump woman somewhere in her forties, with neat dark hair and kind eyes, who Annie privately suspects owns at least three cats. She seems nearly as out of place in the Capitol as any of the victors.

The drugs make her sound like she’s trapped behind glass, perhaps wearing a fishbowl over her head (Annie finds herself giggling at that image, which elicits a concerned look from Mags). District Four’s newest victor strains to focus on the words even as they get stolen away from her mind like pebbles in the tide.

“I don’t give a single flying fuck what Snow insists on!” Orca, angry for reasons Annie can’t remember right now, “Kid damn near drowned, I ain’t gonna let the capitol get their fucking hands on her yet, I’m her  _ mentor _ , and-”

“Don’t push this, Orca.” Mags rarely involved herself in arguments involving the other victors, but when she did, her word was inevitably final. “It won’t work; we don’t have power here. You and I both know that, and Miss Cresta will as well, sooner than either of us would like.”

“I’m right here, y’know. Don’t talk about me in third person.” Annie pushes through the fog inside her head, tries to stop her vision from blurring for five seconds so she can look Mags in the eye. “I’ll talk to Snow, if that’s what we have to do.”

Swinging her legs off the edge of the bed and gripping Orca’s shoulder to steady herself, Annie adds, “I’ll be fine.”

(Spoiler: Annie Cresta is not fine. But then, victors never really are.)

-

Annie drifts.

Images flit behind her eyelids-  _ her Mama laughing, Finnick the night before the games, Luka screaming, Velvet drowning. _

Occasionally she hears fragments of voices, the nurse talking to Orca and Mags in hushed tones that she isn’t meant to listen to, but does anyway. 

_ Collecting starfish, the mast of a boat. Ghosts calling her name. _

They talk about the flood, about the impact treading water for hours likely had on her lungs and kidneys, that she won’t be able to swim anymore. The things it did to her mind, too. Words like “neurological” and “permanent damage” and “trauma” and “pre-existing schizotypal tendencies”. 

She’s the mad victor; it’s a title she shares with her mother. Annie and Lorelai Cresta, those poor mad girls.

Well, good. She might be a victor, but she isn’t going to make this easy for them. She will be every bit as mad as they want her to be, and it will be beautiful and terrifying.

(Knowing this does not stop Annie from crying herself to sleep that night, not for the people she lost to the arena, but for the parts of herself that she might never get back. Annie Cresta is a career tribute unmade; she was trained to survive the arena and had the audacity to come out of it broken regardless, both physically and mentally.)

-

The next time Annie is relatively lucid, Finnick is there, but the other two victors are not.

“Snow still wanna see me?” she stretches, feels like her bones have been replaced with broken glass.

Finnick nods, “Of course he does."

“Is this… is this about what you said to me before the games?”

He doesn’t answer her, that time.

Annie tests the floor with her foot, decides it feels solid enough. Probably not going to open up and swallow her whole. That’s reassuring.

\- 

It’s amazing, Annie thinks in a detached sort of way, how similar talking to President Snow feels to her pre-games interview.

Smile, nod. Look pretty (as pretty as someone who's been near-comatose for a week can; maybe the bruises look like makeup in the right lighting). Give the answers she’s supposed to. Yes sir, no sir, please don’t hurt my family sir.

“You put on quite a show for us in the arena, Mr Cresta.”

( _ Miss  _ Cresta, but there is a time and a place for that argument, and this is neither.)

“Well, wasn’t that what I was supposed to do?” there’s an edge of defiance to her voice that she hopes he doesn’t pick up on, “Nobody likes a boring hunger games.”

“True though that is, there are some in the Capitol that aren’t happy about your little stunt with the dam. They’re considering it  _ cheating _ , and I’m sure neither of us would want that.”

“I saw a weakness and used it to my advantage.” She can’t hide the brief flicker of irritation this time, “That’s what we’re  _ told  _ to do, in games school.”

“I’d advise you to be careful. I hear our boy Finnick has already told you about what it means to win the games. Did you know, he’s one of the most obedient victors we have? How long do you think it took him to learn his lesson?”

Annie doesn’t respond, doesn’t think she could and not make things worse for herself. And she  _ can’t _ , of course; anything she says would just be taken for insubordination. Welcome to being a victor, kid.

“So. What Finnick told me about. When does that start?” She tries to be to the point, doesn’t let any emotion show because that’s what he wants; for her to cry and scream and say that  _ she will never _ , that he _ can’t make her _ .

Protesting here and now would be an exercise in pointlessness. Annie was a career. She knows when not to waste her energy.

Snow doesn’t give her a straight answer. Of course he doesn’t. But she’ll “know soon enough”.

They’d all been so  _ impressed  _ with her in the Capitol, at least until the flood. The way she turned against her fellow careers (Annie seems to remember it being the other way around, but then, maybe the flood damaged her memory. That’s what she’d be told if she asked). Keeping Luka’s head as a memento. Comforting the dying children at the cornucopia, stroking their hair and singing them to sleep before wordlessly taking her knife to their throats.

She has a literal fan club, a  _ waiting list _ , and Snow has  _ plans _ .

Annie doesn’t like that idea. You can’t own the sea, she takes orders from none but the moon. You aren’t meant to fight them, but after everything Annie did in the arena, she doesn’t see how they can ask that of her, of any of them. Teach them to kill and then ask them to never defend themselves, to survive only to become an expensive lay for bored capitolites.

The likes of Finnick Odair might have gone along with that, but she’s  _ Annie Cresta. _ She’s the mad girl, half shark and half hurricane, nobody can  _ make  _ her do anything ever again-

(He can make them do whatever he wants. The trick is to find a way to be that but keep your soul intact.)

“Tell your mother that we miss her here in the Capitol, won’t you?” Snow says as Annie turns to leave, “It’s unfortunate that such a promising young victor chose to seclude herself away in Four only a few years after her games, but I suppose it’s for her own good. She’s quite unstable, you know. Would be a shame if anything were to happen to her.”

-

Sometime between her “little talk” with Snow and her post-games interview, Annie comes to the following conclusion: the Capitol will not let her go without a fight, but if that’s what they want then that’s what they will get.

_ “We don’t have power here” _ , but Annie knows more about power than Mags realizes. You don’t win the hunger games by swimming, either, but Annie had; she never could find Topaz, but all she had to do was wait and sooner rather than later she was the only tribute left alive.

_ Just keep swimming, and outdrown them all. _

Annie refuses to sink, and it’s not going to be easy but nobody ever said it was. For the first time in her life, the odds will not be “ever in Annie Cresta’s favour”. There’s something oddly liberating about the thought.

-

Annie is draped in what looks to be a very torn approximation of a sail. It isn’t modest, but it covers more than her first Capitol outfit had. They coat her in pale, glittering sand; thread pearls and shells through her hair. Her stylist doesn’t give her shoes, so Annie is barefoot.

When she looks in the mirror, she feels like she’s watching a version of herself that drowned in the arena with the other tributes. Perhaps there’s some truth to that metaphor; Ayden Cresta the perfect career tribute is _ dead dead dead _ _and gone beyond the horizon to a place the Capitol can never reach him_. Annie Cresta is the mad girl with eyes like the sea, all that’s left of a kid who never meant to survive.

(Her usual visions of ocean spirits and flying fish have yet to return, but Luka laughs at her from the back of her mind. Annie Cresta is  _ haunted _ .)

Her interview is different this time, and maybe Annie can see Finnick watching her like she’s insane ( _ she is she is she is _ ), like she’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever seen, but she doesn’t care; they should  _ all  _ be scared, bow their heads low before the great Annie, goddess of water and madness and loss.

Caesar informs her, in a voice dripping with mock-awe, that her eventual kill count was 7 (Annie wonders, do they include Ajax in that number? She isn’t sure. She strongly suspects the Capitol doesn’t care. Once the games are over, the tributes become statistics, not people.) 

He asks how it feels to know that she set a new record; Annie replies with her a question of her own, how must it feel for the people behind the games to know that they made her into what she is? her words drip with both honey and venom.

“I had to survive, though.” She adds in a small voice. “I had to come back to tell you that your hair is dumb.”

Caesar looks momentarily affronted before laughing it off and Annie just smiles sweetly, the picture of faux-innocence. 

“You’ve been getting my name wrong, though. All this time.” she takes a deep breath. No going back now. She’s the mad victor; she can say what she wants. “It’s Annie. I’m… Annie. Annie Cresta. Daughter of Lorelai.”

She’s spent years carefully hiding herself in the shell of Ayden, perfect career tribute who doesn’t dress like a girl, who doesn’t see ghosts or talk to the shells. But Annie is a hurricane pulling apart the bonds of her life, _tear it down so we can all be free_. She is Amphitrite, vengeful and lovely, summoning her waves to wash away all the pain of what was.

“I’m the sea.” she whispers, and then, louder, “I’m the messenger of the oceans, I come to demand you stop sacrificing my children!”

And all the people in the districts and the Capitol both would see their screens flicker and fade to black as the technicians work to hide the mad girl’s proclamations, as Annie Cresta laughs to herself on the edge of an abyss.

-

They keep her in the Capitol for longer than most new victors; she spends most of the time in hospital rooms that smell of artificial flowers. Annie reads and sketches and fiddles with Lorelai’s necklace. She suffers through therapy sessions with doctors that touch her more than they need to and watches the marks come and go on Finnick Odair’s perfect skin. He never gets to keep them for long.

Her psychiatrist is called Lunaria Etumbe. She works with most victors, or so she informs Annie, her long black nails playing on the skin of the younger woman’s thigh underneath the too-loose skirt she stole from Orca. Annie wants to go home. Lunaria - “Call me Luna” - tells her that she can only once they’ve ascertained that she “won’t present a threat to herself or anyone else”.

_ Won’t pose a threat to the capitol,  _ is what she doesn’t say but Annie hears nonetheless. 

“So, Ayden, how long have you been having your… delusions?”

Annie wants to say,  _ what delusions?  _ and  _ I think I know my own goddamn name,  _ and  _ look I’m not literally the sea haven’t you people ever heard of a fucking metaphor?  _ But she doesn’t. She thinks of Lorelai, back home in victor’s village, and of Coral, grieving for the brother Annie couldn’t save, and Finnick, being abused by half the capitol the longer Annie makes them stay here, and knows that to argue would be selfish. She’s mad, but she isn’t  _ stupid _ . 

“Forever.”

Lunaria  _ tsks _ , sounding to Annie’s ears like she has something stuck in her teeth. The victor muffles her snort of undignified laughter against a scarred brown hand inked with delicate shells and abstract swirls, the product on Annie's restlessness.

Annie is eventually allowed to leave the city, but she is given a small bottle of pink pills to take with her.

She swallows one, and it makes the world look like she’s watching it from under fogged glass, the sounds reverberating like she’s six feet under water; it’s all too small and too far away and she can’t  _ think _ .

Annie flushes the rest of them down the toilet and doesn’t care whose watching on their stupid little cameras. She's the mad victor; what did they expect?

-

On the train back to District Four, Luka’s screams sing her to sleep.

-

Annie returns to victor’s village; her home for as long as she can remember but somehow so different now. Lorelai is waiting for her; all but falls into her daughter’s arms as soon as they are reunited. Annie isn’t sure which of them is holding the other up.

“I wanted to warn you, Starfish.” Lorelai says into Annie’s hair, and Annie could suffocate in the things she doesn’t need to ask because Lorelai is a victor too, of  _ course  _ she knows. “I really did. I wasn’t allowed. I- I don’t want them to- they use your loved ones against you, I’m sorry, this isn’t what-

“It’s okay, Mama. It’s over now.”

(It’s never over and Annie Cresta should know that already.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there are any parts of this that don't make sense, blame my lack of sleep. I remember sleep. That was fun. I should try that again someday.
> 
> Amphitrite: Difficult to spell ancient greek goddess of the sea. Once a powerful and respected goddess in her own right, later reduced in popular conception to being merely the consort of her husband. (Remind you of anyone else we know?)
> 
> I am 99% sure that the line "keep swiming and outdrown them all" is not actually mine but rather something I read somewhere, but I cannot for the life of me remember where. Possibly a very grimdark reinterpretation of Finding Nemo.


End file.
